Diane Ravitch calls them radical Romanticists. They were a small coterie of talented public school teachers turned educational reformers, who wrote best selling memoirs and exposes of schooling in the 1960s. They constituted a literary movement of sorts. Their ranks included, among many others, the progressive teachers Jonathan Kozol and Pat Conroy. Of the radical practitioner reformers of the 1960s, Harvard educated Jonathan Kozol was one of the most obstreperous and least cautious. Perhaps because the Boston ghetto school that inspired his 1968 book, "Death at an Early Age", which won the National Book Award, was a wreck of a school. Reminiscent of hobbles described in Charles Dickens novels, replete with retired wielding teachers, broken windows in the dead of winter and the stench of urine from leaky toilets, all of which conspired to brutalize the black children whom Kozol took to heart. Kozol taught these kids to appreciate the work of modern poets and artists such as Robert Frost, Paul Klee, William Butler Yeats and Langston Hughes. He publicly pleaded their cause in civil rights demonstrations and other public venues. He was fired. Written several years later, "Death at an Early Age" expose the intransigents and callousness of the Boston School Committee and by implication, white dominated urban school systems throughout the nation. As a social commentary in the civil rights era, and a fine descriptive narrative, it remains an important book. Since the publication of Death at an early age, Kozol has carved out a long and brilliant career as the author of such bestselling books as "Savage Inequalities" and "Amazing Grace", which vividly depict the plight of impoverished urban children and their schools. In coastal South Carolina, Pat Conroy shared Kozol's fate. As a first year teacher on Yamacraw Island near Beaufort, South Carolina, Conroy encountered a similar and equally unforgiving bureaucratic intransigence. Yamacraw Island was a fictional name given to one of the South Carolina's Sea Islands inhabited by descendants of Goolwa blacks who had settled on the island's current cotton plantations. The Yamacraw School was an all-black impoverished island appendage to the Lillywhite mainland's school district. In his best selling book, "The Water is Wide", Conroy described this sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating year as a teacher reformer who refused to compromise with racial segregation. Conroy boated every morning from Beaufort through the marshes through Yamacraw. In "The Water is Wide", Conroy writes that he was appalled at the conditions in the school. A litany of ignorance, he called it. Six children cannot name the president. Eighteen children did not know they lived in the United States. Throughout the year, Conroy remonstrated with the Beaufort's school district to improve conditions at Yamacraw, leapfrogging the district staff to lay his grievances directly at the superintendent's doorstep. Sometimes in letters, sometimes in person always full of righteous indignation, "Colonel Conroy the chieftain of my clan, issued a hardshell rule in my youth that the most unforgivable of sins was for a Conroy to beat around the bush, put garlands of roses around his thoughts or ideas or horror of horrors for a Conroy to drop to his knees pucker up his potato famine lips and kiss somebodys rosy red behind." Conroy single handedly desegregated the Beaufort's school district when he and his wife boarded three Yamacraw children in their home. And so the children could attend junior high school on the mainland. Looking for a reason to rid itself of Conroy, the school board fired him when it learned that he had taken a week's leave of absence to work as a consultant for the South Carolina desegregation center. After Yamacraw, Conroy pursued a less turbulent career as a famous novelist of life and family in the Carolina Tidewater. In our next episode we turn to the civil rights movement and education and the Supreme Court cases that led up to the court's turning point decision in 1954 to desegregate the South's public schools.
